Government as Apothecary:

Abstract

While the United States government’s Army laboratory in Philadelphia during the Civil War has been long recognized, the US Naval laboratory in Brooklyn deserves more attention. This essay will examine the significant interplay between both, and their long-term influence on large-scale pharmaceutical manufacturing. I conclude that the explosion of the pharmaceutical industry in the post-war years was a direct result of the unprecedented demand for medicines arising from wartime needs. The Army and Navy laboratories became “classrooms” for mass-manufacturing principles and, at the height of laissez-faire capitalism, the government’s intervention facilitated entrepreneurship for an eponymous industry. These labs formed the basis of an expanded pharmaceutical industry (in tandem with private interests) and later provided for the professionalization of pharmacy in America’s post-war “market society.”